Learning Long-Range Dependencies with Temporal Predictive Coding

Fuente: arXiv
Guardado en:
Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Potter, Tom, Rhodes, Oliver
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2026
Materias:
Acceso en línea:
Etiquetas: Agregar Etiqueta
Sin Etiquetas, Sea el primero en etiquetar este registro!
_version_ 1866908843576918016
author Potter, Tom
Rhodes, Oliver
author_facet Potter, Tom
Rhodes, Oliver
contents Predictive Coding (PC) is a biologically-inspired learning framework characterised by local, parallelisable operations, properties that enable energy-efficient implementation on neuromorphic hardware. Despite this, extending PC effectively to recurrent neural networks (RNNs) has been challenging, particularly for tasks involving long-range temporal dependencies. Backpropagation Through Time (BPTT) remains the dominant method for training RNNs, but its non-local computation, lack of spatial parallelism, and requirement to store extensive activation histories results in significant energy consumption. This work introduces a novel method combining Temporal Predictive Coding (tPC) with approximate Real-Time Recurrent Learning (RTRL), enabling effective spatio-temporal credit assignment. Results indicate that the proposed method can closely match the performance of BPTT on both synthetic benchmarks and real-world tasks. On a challenging machine translation task, with a 15-million parameter model, the proposed method achieves a test perplexity of 7.62 (vs. 7.49 for BPTT), marking one of the first applications of tPC to tasks of this scale. These findings demonstrate the potential of this method to learn complex temporal dependencies whilst retaining the local, parallelisable, and flexible properties of the original PC framework, paving the way for more energy-efficient learning systems.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_18131
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Learning Long-Range Dependencies with Temporal Predictive Coding
Potter, Tom
Rhodes, Oliver
Machine Learning
Predictive Coding (PC) is a biologically-inspired learning framework characterised by local, parallelisable operations, properties that enable energy-efficient implementation on neuromorphic hardware. Despite this, extending PC effectively to recurrent neural networks (RNNs) has been challenging, particularly for tasks involving long-range temporal dependencies. Backpropagation Through Time (BPTT) remains the dominant method for training RNNs, but its non-local computation, lack of spatial parallelism, and requirement to store extensive activation histories results in significant energy consumption. This work introduces a novel method combining Temporal Predictive Coding (tPC) with approximate Real-Time Recurrent Learning (RTRL), enabling effective spatio-temporal credit assignment. Results indicate that the proposed method can closely match the performance of BPTT on both synthetic benchmarks and real-world tasks. On a challenging machine translation task, with a 15-million parameter model, the proposed method achieves a test perplexity of 7.62 (vs. 7.49 for BPTT), marking one of the first applications of tPC to tasks of this scale. These findings demonstrate the potential of this method to learn complex temporal dependencies whilst retaining the local, parallelisable, and flexible properties of the original PC framework, paving the way for more energy-efficient learning systems.
title Learning Long-Range Dependencies with Temporal Predictive Coding
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.18131